This page gives a background to a few topics which I have thought about enough to be worth writing about.

Politics

This seems to be about Power, Personality and Parties. Not things I have any worthwhile opinions on. I have never felt the need to join a party. Vote for one, yes. But only express specific rejection, not support. Thus I do not support the Green Party over others but would not vote any party that does not take the implications of “Limits to Growth” seriously.

Inequality

A long time ago I formed the opinion that excessive inequality is a Bad Thing and I thought it likely that there would be some sort of correlation between inequality and Bad Things. From reading news and a limited amount of history it seemed to me that, a considerable degree of inequality has been and still was the norm and very unequal countries would be divided between the vast majority, suffering the effects of poverty and a tiny minority, the rich, for whom falling into poverty is unthinkable. The prospect of poverty is so horrific for the rich that they will embrace anything that supports their situation, no matter how immoral or irrational. In particular they would favour actions that increased inequality even further. Thus inequality can be both cause and effect of Bad Things.

I have done a considerable amount of investigation using spreadsheets to find evidence that it is actually a Bad Thing.

Fairness Pays Is a presentation in which, using easily available data, I show how countries that are more “unfair”, that is, where there are higher levels of corruption and inequality, are poorer.

In another presentation I show some estimates of the effects of a change of equality

Note that the return from these presentations does not work.

A citizen’s Basic Income

Some time ago, I posed the question to myself: are there any circumstances in which a citizen in a compassionate society could be allowed to starve? If the answer is no then every citizen is going to have an income anyway, so why not provide this by a better route? Looking at the tax and benefits system as a machine, it is clear that it is simply connected up wrongly.

Since then I discovered work of the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust. Finding that I had independently come to the same conclusion as a lot of Really Serious people greatly reinforced my view that this really is a Good Idea.

The organization Compass also did a study and came to broadly the same result.

I looked at the idea from different angles

Voting systems

In the run-up to the AV referendum, I did a spreadsheet study to work out how the outcome would differ from First-Past-The-Post (FPTP). I confirmed the result would usually be the same but otherwise nearly always better by a number of different criteria.
Armed with this insight, I got active in politics for the first time in my life, I joined some friends involved in the Yes campaign with a stall in the town centre, handing out leaflets and occasional rational discussion. I developed some material aimed at showing how AV would be the better choice. I also built a mechanical “computer” using sliders and string. I made a video of it which I intend to post here when I can find it in my backups.
We saw that the NO campaign did not engage in rational discussion, rather it depended on assertion, lies and misinformation. So we need to learn from this sorry history and think about what next.

Since then I have put a little bit of thought into how the AV voting system might be to be used to allow voters to express disapproval of certain candidates as well as approval.

Some time ago I also put a lot of thought, and a bit of money into developing an online system of deliberative democracy called Participation Forum. This work resulted in a working prototype interface. I did make it publically accessible its own domain but it’s all gone off the boil and I closed down the domain. The program still exists and I plan to make it accessible from this site but I need help of a WP guru.

Trust

Trust is a fundamental requirement for the better society. Deception and fakery have always been with us, but the potential of AI is deeply concerning.

This site

This site is my public notebook. It is consists of a number of linked pages each dealing with a particular topic that I have been thinking about. I am still working on some of these pages and may make changes. I will note significant changes in the Log